I’ve been thinking over the past few days (god above knows what caused this train of thought….) about one feature I have never seen implemented in a Webmail system. I’ve used a few different systems in my time, Yahoo! mail, Excite, Squirrel Mail, Horde, a couple of other dodgy implementations that I can’t remember, and most recently GMail (which I’m still pretty much in love with.) But still none of these have let you see multiple email accounts in the same page.

Now, I know that the big providers let you access another account, typically by POP3, but these just download the email from your other account and dump it into your webmail inbox.

Compare this to an email application on your Desktop – whether that be Outlook, Mail.app, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc – when you add multiple accounts with those systems, you view each account completely separately. Some offer a unified inbox (which is great) but I also want to be able to split my email accounts out.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to access them using IMAP as well (but because of bandwidth, etc, that’s a bit of a pipe dream)

Thinking about this more, here’s how I would like it to work in Gmail.

Emails are downloaded from my other accounts via POP3

The “inbox” label is used for all emails downloaded – this becomes my unified inbox

A link below the “Inbox” link on the left should be shown for all of the different accounts. This would include the default GMail Inbox. Clicking on one of these would show the inbox of just that account.

A separate “account:” search flag is created for each account. This makes searching easier.

The “Multiple Inboxes” labs feature could be used split out each account at the main inbox screen as well.

I remember a similar conversation of topic being raised on QI once. Apparently, bears would frequently win because they have a massive crushing power with their paws. One swipe to the head and the lion’s skull is crushed.

Hmmm, I’m not sure that the conclusions that they have drawn are necessarily complete.

Yes, Apple could be using it as a great leverage tool with Intel. But if that were the case, why wouldn’t they just rely on their own (new) chip manufactoring capacities?

My thoughts turn to the future: AMD have the x86_64 architecture that Intel have no comparison to.There are several draws there for Apple for at least examining the chip.

Apple make their systems perform like no other. Seriously, look at the base specs of the Macbook Pro. Whilst other manufacturers are churning out middle of the road, low-end shite, Apple make their systems powerful by default. Seeing as a lot of video processing and graphics work get done on Macs; and that processing requires large numerical calculations; having 64-bit integers by default makes life easier, and a seriously selling point for their high-end workstations.

Even if the advantages of the 64-bit system are used immediately, it still supports x86_32 (or IA32 or whatever you want to call it!) – something that Intel’s chips don’t do.

They already have the Mach Universal binary format, and there is already compilation for 64-bit systems available in Xcode (although not necessarily x86_64) – adding a new one would be quite simple.

Apple always appear (to me at least) to be a company that are experimenting in the background, even if they don’t go the 64-bit route, at least they can say that they’ve tried!